Nonfiction in Brief

By James Nuechterlein

Published: October 18, 1981

This is one of those books whose cause is better than its argument.Oscar Handlin, the distinguished Harvard historian, believes that American foreign policy is in disarray, and that the deterioration of the American position in the world owes as much to intellectual and moral failure as to strategic weakness. He traces, in a series of more or less related chapters, the disintegration of a national consensus for the doctrine of collective security, which guided American policy from World War II through the mid-1960's. In the wake of its collapse, he argues, we have witnessed an increase in moral and political neutralism among both nations and individuals, a decline in standards of international law and a growing inability or unwillingness among many in the West to stand unambiguously against the expansion of Communist ideology and military power.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Handlin attributes much of this collapse of will to the Vietnam experience. He focuses his attention not on the official policy that caused the war, but on the struggle against American involvement by antiwar critics. Much of this dissent, he suggests, was sentimental in its analysis, excessive in its attacks on American policies and values, and unrealistic in its assessments of the limited choices America faced in the conflict. He concedes, in the end, that the corpse of collective security cannot be revived, but he argues that we need to replace it with some workable equivalent, which will only be possible when policy makers and intellectuals renew their faith in the moral superiority of the West and then learn to deal, without illusions and with a disciplined sense of the possible, with the world as it is.

One can agree with many or most of Mr. Handlin's positions and still regret the forms in which he has cast them. In the first place, this is not actually a book. It is rather a reworking and updating of scattered articles the author has published over the past 25 years. New material has been added, but the individual parts do not form a coherent whole. Some of the chapters include portions of as many as three earlier articles, and as a result they wander confusingly in search of a central argument. The confusion and discontinuity within chapters sometimes extend to the relationship between them. Mr. Handlin has raised a number of important issues, but he has not developed them fully and he has not brought them together in a continuous argument.

He also lacks a sense of proportion and context. Things have changed considerably since the early 70's, but Mr. Handlin appears not to have noticed. Those who feel about American foreign policy as Mr. Handlin does are more numerous than he thinks, and they have elsewhere made his case more effectively than he has managed to do here. REFLECTIONS ON THE CIVIL WAR By Bruce Catton. Edited by John Leekley. Illustrated. 246 pp. New York: Doubleday & Co. $15.95.

Before his death in 1978, Bruce Catton had earned a reputation with the general public - though not necessarily among professional historians - as the greatest historian of the American Civil War. This book, compiled by John Leekley from tape recordings Catton made for educational distribution, adds little new to the Catton canon, but it does provide, along with a capsule overview of the war, evidence of his characteristic strengths and weaknesses.

Catton's discussion of the causes and conduct of the war is competent (with the exception of his peculiar idea that slaves in the Deep South were regularly worked to death), but it says nothing that could not be found in any adequate textbook. Still, he at least understands that the war was about slavery and race, a fundamental point that many academic historians, searching for underlying causes of the conflict, somehow manage to talk themselves out of.

Catton demonstrates his mastery of the military history of the conflict (which to Civil War buffs is what the war was really all about) through his analysis of the major campaigns, although this section of the book is too summary to suggest fully the depth of his knowledge.

He is at his best, and the book at its most fresh and useful, in the extended discussion of the everyday experience of life during wartime. We get the sense of what the war meant to civilians and to the ordinary soldier. Above all, we are reminded how miserable life was for those who fought on either side. This part of the book is illustrated with drawings from the sketchbook of a young Union soldier, John Geyser.

To Catton, the Civil War, for all its tragic elements, was not in itself a tragedy. It was worthwhile, he argued, because it both preserved the Union and extended freedom. Even the defeated South managed over time to find consolation, as it slowly built the legend of the Lost Cause. The entire war, Catton felt, has been elevated in the national memory into the purest expression of ''American romance.''